FSF Leadership

April 12 2004

FSF is pleased to announce that on Sunday 28 March 2004, Lawrence Lessig was elected to the Foundation's Board of Directors. Professor Lessig is based at Stanford University, and is the author of many key books on the ideas about freedom in the digital age, including his recently published book Free Culture. Professor Lessig has been a strong supporter of FSF for many years, and previously won FSF's Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his extensive work educating the public about the important issues of freedom in the digital age.

FSF focuses much energy today on the greatest threat yet to software freedom, which comes in the form of legal threats to the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the legal systems whereby GPL'd software is assembled. Eben Moglen (professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University), since his early work with Richard Stallman in GPL enforcement during the 1990s, and even further since joining FSF's Board in July 2000, has led the fight for the freedom of Free Software on legal grounds. FSF welcomes Professor Lessig to the Board and to the team begun by Professor Moglen to neutralize the legal threats brought against the freedom of Free Software.

The academic legal world has just begun to realize the innovation and vision provided by copyleft licensing that FSF invented. FSF is proud that the two most prominent academic legal minds on this subject both now serve as Directors of the organization.

With the addition of Professor Lessig, FSF now has six Directors. They are:

• Geoffery Knauth, Senior Software Engineer at SFA, Inc.
• Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University
• Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University
• Henri Poole, Founder of CivicActions, a grassroots campaign technology consulting firm.
• Richard M. Stallman, Founder of FSF and the GNU Project and author of the GNU GPL, Versions 1 and 2
• Gerald J. Sussman, Professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology